Pages tagged "protests"

“We revolt because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” - Frantz Fanon

“When you control for joblessness, the racial disparities in violent crime disappear...A shift occurred in urban communities across America beginning in the late 50s and early 60s and into the 70s, where work disappeared. It used to be that factories were located in segregated urban communities where they could have quick and easy access to cheap black labor. Almost overnight, those jobs vanished. Due to deindustrialization, globalization, technological advancement, factories closing down, jobs moving overseas, hundreds of thousands of people, overwhelmingly black men, found themselves suddenly jobless, trapped in racially segregated, jobless communities. Trapped. Economic collapse occurred. We could have responded with an outpouring of care and compassion, with economic stimulus programs, with bailout packages. But no, we chose a different road, a road more familiar when it comes to matters of race. We chose the road of division, punitiveness, and despair. We as a society ended the War on Poverty, and declared the War on Drugs. Black men suddenly found themselves disposable. No longer necessary to the functioning of the U.S. economy, precisely at the same moment that a backlash was brewing against the civil rights movement, a backlash that made it convenient for politicians to demonize black men as criminals. No longer needed to work, these black men found themselves scapegoats, pawns in political games, the enemy in a new war. They were rounded up by the millions, locked up, and then permanently locked out. And now decades later we stand back and say 'what's wrong with these people?'” - Michelle Alexander

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is outraged but not surprised at the failure of the St. Louis County grand jury to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. The structural bias in our judicial and criminal justice system in favor of police who engage in violent action against unarmed Black and Brown people rendered the outcome unsurprising, yet still enraging. How can an unarmed person be killed by an armed police officer without there being a case for a criminal prosecution? The glaring injustice of the grand jury verdict is why tens of thousands of individuals across the country stormed into the streets after the announcement of the grand jury verdict. DSA joins others in demanding that the Federal Department of Justice continue its investigation into the conduct of the Ferguson police department and the possible violation of Michael Brown's civil rights by Officer Wilson and the department.

This weekend, I, along with several other students from the University of Missouri-Columbia, traveled to Saint Louis to stand in solidarity with the protestors in Ferguson. What I saw and experienced there was astonishing and enraging. Every night there are strong, young, and radical voices engaging in nonviolent, but militant, civil disobedience. They’ve organized in groups such as Lost Voices, who have slept out on the streets and protested nightly since Mike Brown was murdered. They’re critiquing not just the police state, but also patriarchy and white supremacy in an attempt to take back their community for themselves.

Friday night, we arrived in Saint Louis around 9 p.m. and immediately started marching to the Ferguson police station, following a candlelight vigil. The march was loud, focused, angry, but not violent. We were stopped momentarily by a few police checkpoints, but kept marching through. Once we reached the police station, we were greeted by a group of about 400 other protesters, and together we marched to the police barricade shouting chants such as, “No justice! No peace!” and “Mike Brown means we’ve got to fight back!” I stood together with others, arms locked, as we provided a barrier between the police and the peaceful protest. When we were finished there, we marched back to West Florissant Street, chanting all along the way, as police in helicopters beamed down on us.

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.